I've been holding off on posting until today because I was waiting for this story to be unveiled by the USDA. The announcement will come from Michelle Obama at 10:30 this morning, so I'll have a larger update later on.

The food pyramid has been an issue of contention for many years, serving as the focal point of many disputes between nutritionists, doctors, personal trainers, athletes, and busy parents. The USDA and the FDA struggled to find one simple image that could convey what a healthy balanced diet should look like. Our country has been led to believe that we should be functioning very heavily on carbs, and it seems that vegetables and protein weren't getting as much time in the spotlight. This could be in part because of "big business" controlling food output, and also due to America's need to go with quick meals, and the easy availability of carbs in so many of our processed foods.

We then got this revised graphic featured at www.MyPyramid.gov - designed to make the pyramid easier to understand, it instead confused many people and didn't address any of the imbalances that the pyramid produces. The one good tool that the site tried to develop was the personalization of the pyramid, but unfortunately the macronutrient balances that your personal plan are based off of are still wrong.

Finally today, we will see what the next evolution of the food pyramid will look like, and it will be...a plate?

Yes a plate; a universally recognizable shape that should hopefully be developed in a way that steers people away from an overindulgance of carbohydrates, and instead focuses on a healthy mix of proteins and carbs, and giving fruits and vegetables a much bigger slice of the pie, so to speak. There will also be a little 'satellite circle', in which dairy products will live. An interesting move to push dairy intake a bit further out of the picture, I would say. This plate will also reflect a change that is needed in lieu of the fact that there are millions of people living in the country with food allergies; creating a diet that looks more like this new plate should help cater a bit more to curb the increasing incidents of allergic intolerances.